Which For All Mankind characters are real? At least one of them really did go to space
Apple TV+'s alternate-history epic imagines the Soviets landing on the moon first in 1969 and the space race never ending. Its leads — Ed Baldwin, Danielle Poole, Margo Madison, the Stevens family — are all invented.
But the show salts real people all through its fictional NASA, and one of them has a true story stranger than anything the writers cooked up.
The real people in the show
- Deke Slayton — Chris Bauer plays the real head of the astronaut office, a genuine Mercury 7 astronaut.
- Wernher von Braun — the real (ex-Nazi) rocket engineer behind the Apollo launch vehicle, though the show moves him to Houston; in reality he ran Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
- Gene Kranz and Thomas O. Paine — the real flight director and NASA administrator, in their actual jobs.
- The Apollo 11 crew — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins all appear, as does Apollo 12's Pete Conrad.
- Alexei Leonov — a real cosmonaut (the first human to walk in space, in 1965) who becomes the show's first man on the moon.
- The politicians — Nixon, Ted Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan all feature in the altered timeline.
The one who really flew
That's Deke Slayton — and his true story is remarkable. Selected among the original Mercury 7 in 1959, he was grounded in 1962 by an irregular heartbeat and spent 13 years running the astronaut office, assigning everyone else to the flights he couldn't take. Then, in July 1975, finally cleared to fly, he reached orbit at age 51 on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project — the first joint US-Soviet mission. The waiting-room king finally got his ride.
Molly Cobb: fictional name, real inspiration
Sonya Walger's Molly Cobb is invented, but she's directly modeled on Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb of the real Mercury 13 — a privately funded program in which women passed the same grueling tests as NASA's male astronauts.
The real Cobb argued before Congress in 1962 that women should fly. She never got the chance; no American woman reached space until Sally Ride in 1983. The show hands Molly the flight Jerrie was denied.
And Margo Madison?
Showrunner Ronald D. Moore has said Margo was inspired by a famous 1969 photo of a young woman at NASA — widely identified as Apollo software pioneer Margaret Hamilton.
"There was something inspiring about this young woman working at NASA," Moore told Physics Today.
For the record: the show's Molly Cobb dies saving lives in a 1995 attack, and NASA's Houston campus is renamed the Molly Cobb Space Center. The real Johnson Space Center still carries a president's name. In this timeline, anyway.